The construction of a dam on the Euphrates River is an example of a country’s economic development. Through grandly composed images, rhythmic editing, and aestheticized details, the director demonstrates his admiration for the interwar avant-garde. The film is a celebration of the new, while at the same time showing a traditional way of life and calling attention to working conditions; it is a refrain-like evocation of an arid country that explores the difficult lot of Syria’s rural inhabitants.
The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.
Bil'in Habibti
2006
10
Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.
West of the Jordan River
2018
5
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
ואלס עם באשיר
2008
7
On May 8, 1989, Sports Illustrated ran an article about Ultimate frisbee… about a team with no name hailing from New York City that was about to change the sport forever. From its 1968 New Jersey birth to its unanimous 2015 recognition by the International Olympic Committee, FLATBALL circles the globe to showcase four decades of world-class Ultimate and goes even further: to a set of fields in the Middle East to understand and demystify the unique spirit of the game.
Flatball: A History of Ultimate
2016
7
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
Manufactured Landscapes
2006
7
The film documents modern slave trade through a number of African countries, under dictatorship rule. The filming was conducted both in public places, and sometimes with the use of hidden cameras, for high impact scenes of nudity, sex, and violence - and a few surprises, as slaves made out of peregrins to Asia, and slave traders paid in traveller checks.
Le schiave esistono ancora
1964
4
In a community of a Muslim majority, the first woman pastor in the Middle East leads a parish in one of the poorest city of the Mediterranean, in the heart of Tripoli, North Lebanon.
القسيسة
2023
0
On the verge of the election, the director Avi Mograbi aims to make a documentary on the most maligned Israeli politician, Arik Sharon. Against all his prediction, Mograbi discovers that Sharon is friendly and welcoming, completely different from the man who was thought to be...
Eich Hifsakti L'fahed V'lamadeti L'ehov et Arik Sharon
1997
6
AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.
Amin
2010
0
Documentary on water usage, money, politics, the transformation of nature, and the growth of the American west, shown on PBS as a four-part miniseries.
Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature
1997
0
We Are Not Princesses is a documentary film about the incredible strength and spirit of four Syrian women living as refugees in Beirut as they come together to tell their stories of love, loss, pain and hope through the ancient Greek play, Antigone.
We Are Not Princesses
2018
0
During the darkest days of the Depression when construction was started on Grand Coulee Dam, everything about it was described in superlatives. It would be the "Biggest Thing on Earth," the salvation of the common man, a dam and irrigation project that would make the desert bloom, a source of cheap power that would boost an entire region of the country. Of the many public works projects of the New Deal, Grand Coulee Dam loomed largest in America's imagination, promising to fulfill President Franklin Roosevelt's vision for a "planned promised land" where hard-working farm families would finally be free from the drought and dislocation caused by the elements.
Grand Coulee Dam
2017
6
The inside story of Mohammed Emwazi's journey from being an ordinary London boy to becoming terrorist 'Jihadi John', and the intelligence operatives' attempts to catch him.
The Hunt for Jihadi John
2019
0
This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as "Exodus", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Black Sunday", "Little Drummer Girl", and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.
مقدمة لنهايات جدال
1990
7
In the late 1960s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, Leninist guerrilla movement. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war.
ساعة التحرير دقت
1974
6
In Breaking Bread, exotic cuisine and a side of politics are on the menu. Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel - the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's MasterChef - is on a quest to make a social change through food. And so, she founded the A-sham Arabic Food Festival in Haifa. There, pairs of Arab and Jewish chefs collaborate on mouthwatering dishes like kishek (a Syrian yogurt soup), and qatayef (a dessert typically served during Ramadan), as we savor the taste of hope and discover the food of their region free from political and religious boundaries.
Breaking Bread
2022
10
A feature-length documentary film by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. After 43 horrific days working round the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, emerged to find himself as a face of Palestinian resistance.
حالة عشق
2024
0
An exploration into the man behind the film-inspired myth, from both Western and Arab perspectives. Thomas Edward Lawrence, a 24-year-old British spy, was a figurehead in the Arab struggle for independence. In 1916, he united Arab tribes and led them in a war against the Turks who ruled over them for 400 years. The consequences of his successes and failures sowed the seeds of conflict that continue to plague the troubled region even today.
Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World
2003
0
A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
The Judge
2017
6
Explore the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the second deadliest disaster in California history. A colossal engineering and human failure, the dam was built by William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer who ensured the growth of Los Angeles by bringing the city water via aqueduct. The catastrophe killed more than 400 people and destroyed millions of dollars of property.
Flood in the Desert
2022
10